JAMES TAM  谭炳昌

Finally, we've reached the end of the Flower Lounge story. Contemplation may not be an existential prerequisite, but is very likely the primary distinction between man and beast. Only through deliberate thinking can humans deny, restrain, or indulge basic instincts and develop human nature, for better or for worse. Trying to understand one’s existence is a natural, reflexive, down-to-earth human curiosity; it doesn’t have to be arcanely philosophical.

Justice is paradoxically unique and universal, intuitive and complex all at once. Humanity seems further from universal justice after millennia of contemplation, deliberation, and experimentation. It was high time that some prisoner gave this dead-end issue some good thinking in his plentiful spare time. I volunteered. From social justice, my reverie ventured into slippery territories like reincarnation.

Freedom is a bewitching phantom. Many who defend it with a passion don’t seem to know what it is. They can’t define or describe its basic features, significance, or potential meaning to our lives. Why is it so blindly, embraced? If a hungry person gets food, he gobbles it up. What would an unfree person do if given unlimited freedom? These questions tickled my mind when I stood still to kill time in jail, surrounded by men who had been denied freedom

Do they mean to frame and jail innocent people? Don’t think so. They probably think they’re doing the right thing, if they bother to think at all. It’s only a job, a game with simple rules for simple people to play out their assigned roles in a world they don’t understand, but too lazy or afraid to ponder. Forgive them, or turn into ashes before 27 May 2014 — a simple choice.

As I worry about security and safety in HongKong's worst hellhole, more guards show up. Don’t know how many. The silence tells me there are more than one. Unlike the duty officer, their steps are light, purposeful, and ominous. Without a word, the gate is opened. Without a word, they leave. Quietness resumes, punctuated by caterwauling, humans snoring, and the roaring of my internal furnace stoked up afresh by volatile adrenalin and dark energy.

Prison is not at all like what I had imagined

The learned judge looks fancy today, donning a yellowish springy peruke, looking like an emoji. The gallery quiets down. Everyone stands.

【Flower Lounge】 Table of Content and Chapter One -- Broken Reality. Prison was diabolically different from what I had imagined. During my first day in jail, reality broke.

Flower Lounge is 'prison' in Triad parlance. It's a true story, but a story after all. It focuses on my experience as a prisoner from the moment of conviction to eventual discharge & how I responded to the abrupt transition physically and emotionally. I've also shared selected stories of the inmates and guards, as well as some lighthearted moments. Flower Lounge made me rethink the judiciary traditions from a different angle, and the delusive nature of freedom and justice.